


Catching Smoke

by stillmadaboutpetra



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Body Horror, Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark, Gore, Horror, Squint and u can swing necrophilia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-11
Updated: 2015-08-11
Packaged: 2018-04-14 05:55:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4553247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillmadaboutpetra/pseuds/stillmadaboutpetra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Levi dies. Erwin brings him back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Catching Smoke

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jankan42249](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jankan42249/gifts).



> Tumblr user jannisthemenace won my fic giveaway and gave me an interesting prompt :) I've never written something like this before, like dark and horror etc so let me know what you think. I hope you liked it Jan!

  
  
  
The plunge of Wall Maria broke most hopes. Stone that had stood the test of time undocumented, fabricated, turned to dust beneath the raging paw of titans, banshee howls of Hell coming forth. A flood. A warning, gospel gallows. It was a warning Erwin didn’t heed. The devil could come and here he would wait, a sword and a fiddle and a Titan slayer at his side.  
  
Twin blades out, he issues an order to Levi to send him flying, the nearest team in the chaos at the corner of his wings, capes casting shadows like birds of prey. One abnormal skitters overtop a church roof, hands clutching cathedral spires, shingles crashing to the floor and stained glass shattering over screams. Believers hiding in the basement, praying hands shaking upwards. A second abnormal with a wide-split face, jaw so ungainly it hangs like a broken bridge, shoving in, heaving breath, through double doors, licking out floorboards and frightened followers alike.  
  
Erwin counts it off as Levi descends, a murder of crows falling in his wake. So he turns his attention elsewhere, heavy and complete, moving forward with another team to clear civilians and stave off the hoard of Titans reaching towards the center city.  
  
It is at once a thought and not at all to send Levi to the mouth of giants. Like reaching behind himself, hand out of sight, assuming nothing would bite it from his wrist -- but not able to turn and look.  
  
But he is bitten. God, he is bitten.  
  
He feels the pain before he sees the wound; when Levi doesn’t return to him, when the soldiers sent alongside him don’t return; the teeth break the skin. And when the streets are swept, steam rising up like vaults from below at the corner of every street, blood and guts fly-swarm sticky, he knows. Levi comes to his hands twisted, blood raised to his skin like lovebites. Death loves him hard. A caved in chest, a neck flopping with his skull like a flowerhead too heavy for its stem. His cravat has slipped from its knot, lost to the crumpled cathedral debris. On a stretcher, like he might be saved still, Levi comes to him. A plucked rose wrapped in white. A closed bud, petals hemorrhaged, rigor tight. Only the night before Erwin had held him under the moon, nectar wet and sleepless. The imprint of Erwin‘s teeth given in orgasm go to death, a wedding gift.  
  
He strokes them now. His canines knick points on the ashen slope of Levi’s shoulder, the meat as strong and cold as a butcher’s quarter. Erwin keeps a hand over Levi’s wide-open eyes. No one’s really beautiful when they’re dead.  
  
“I needed you to come back,” Erwin tells the dead. All of them and Levi most of all. Numbness pinches off his arms, his legs. His throat. Erwin feels bodiless, floating, as cold as Levi. The body in his arms is smaller than its ever felt and heavier too. All this time, Levi has been taking the weight from Erwin and now the burden is his alone.  
  
The devil could come and he would find Erwin here, a sword and a fiddle and empty thorn choking a broken throat.    
__  
News of Levi’s death spreads like a disease; it claims.  
  
“Seven soldiers have deserted,” Mike reports. He’s been wearing his mask all day, indoors and out. Rot lingers.  
  
“The first of many.” Erwin takes the names from Mike. There’s only so much a heart can bear. He has no use for the feeble.  
  
The nib of his idle pen drips ink. The thought of adding his name to the list of AWOL soldiers doesn’t pass his mind -- he has no heart to grow fear.  
__  
Levi’s body doesn’t go with his comrades.  
  
“He’ll be dressed in uniform,” Zackly says.  
  
“He’ll need a new one,” Erwin points out, as if they both haven’t seen the patches of blood, the filth, the dust of crumbled clay and crumbled hopes.  
  
“Did he ever receive his formal attire?”  
  
Erwin had suggested it once, that Levi have a proper formal uniform. Levi had sweetly inquired as to the price and stared Erwin down with his answer. _If you trot me around as a show pony people will have to deal with any shit I track in_. The small shake of Erwin’s head makes Zackly cast a brief, fleeting look heavenward. Does Levi snarl at him from above? The blow of Humanity’s Strongest is as bad as Maria falling. For once, the Military Police are being put to the test, riots broken out in every city. More than a few suicides. Refugees line the streets. Bodies have been burning for hours -- the winds turned west and pushed ghosts all the way to the king.  
  
“He gave his heart to humanity. They need this. Closure, Erwin.” And Levi’s heart lay cold and still in his chest, ready to be feasted on. His pier a cornucopia. Levi wouldn’t want this, but he wouldn’t want to be dead either. They’re taking his body from Erwin, dressing him up, measuring his lifeless limbs to dress in regalia and honors he didn’t care for, to burn for people who spat at his feet. “It’s an honor. No one will forget him.”  
  
Erwin glares, eyes as steely as a reaper’s scythe. No one who loved Levi would forget him. Who knows how long that’ll last. They’re a dying breed.  
  
“Erwin,” Zackly sighs, an apology. “Give them this.”  
  
Erwin has given them everything.  
\--  
_For a man living on the edge of death, Levi kissed like he had forever squared away in a back alley deal. Too many close calls had stretched Levi’s life into long sighs._  
  
_“My mother said I tried to dodge the catcher’s hand. You laugh, but you’ve said it before -- what was it -- I’m like catching smoke?” He blew white rings to the ceiling, fading kisses of his cigarette. Erwin replaces them along Levi‘s neck._  
_“I caught you, didn’t I?”_  
  
_Nails scratch the inside of his thigh, a tickle for a tickle. “I thought that was Mike.”_  
  
_“Well maybe if you were covered in placenta you’d be the prince of the streets still…“ At Levi’s look, Erwin only smiles wider. “And yes, I do find myself charming, thank you for the compliment, Levi.”_  
\--  
  
They paint him white. The sky reflects on his clayed skin till he looks as dull as coal ashes, cracking in fine slivers where his face continued to sink, drawing away from the spectacle left of his death. No dots of rouge marked his cheeks, no mistake of life left to blush -- his lips had lost all traces of kisses ever given. Funeral makeup, not the pretty powders of lords and ladies.  
  
But it is only his face, all the rest of him dressed, even his slender hands gloved. Levi had been taken from Erwin and now his body too, dressed by strangers hands, fingers that must have brushed the funeral flowers of Erwin’s love, farewell letters he never knew he was sending. A body nothing more than kindling to raise a smoke signal like a mourning bell, churches chiming in time, up to blot out the dawn and mark the day. Smoke that, with the right light, turns white and silken like a flag of surrender to bugged fish eyes and gulping mouths that swallowed the seas first and the sailors last.  
  
The blow of Levi’s death must be taken in the gut. Erwin’s flinching before the wind up.  
  
Strongest has met its match. Now here’s a match. It’s time to erase the shortcoming -- at whose feet does the fault lie? The word for misleading them, the sainting of but a soldier? Levi slips into the past tense. He was Humanity’s Strongest - he was.  
  
Royal attendants avoid Erwin as they stack bundle after bundle of kindling around the slab of rock that, despite a thorough cleaning, holds the dinginess of the last public burning. A high-tiered Wallist. Levi would either laugh or retch.  
  
“I have to make a speech tomorrow,” Erwin whispers to a deaf ear. He’s leaned over close to the corpse, bent at the waist, elbows comfortably nudged to Levi’s body. “I’m tempted not to write a thing. You’d just tell me to pull it out of my ass.” Levi’s hair is still soft, clean, when Erwin adjusts its off his face. He’s careful not to smudge his skin. Levi hadn’t always been a good solider and hadn’t always been a good man, but good’s just a word, and they don’t do much these days.  
  
It isn’t until someone speaks up “sir,” a lash on Erwin’s back that he comes to himself, posture stiff. His lungs have collapsed in grief, and he sucks in a breath, torn awake to a headache brought on by clenching his jaw, face as fixed as Levi’s, a red glaze over his eyes.  
  
“If we could…” the attendant trails off. Surrounding Levi’s body is a veritable barricade of wood, save for the space Erwin stands.  
  
It’s just a body after all. Not even a missing limb. Had the cadets that spotted Levi’s corpse rushed to him, hopeful like children finding a kitten crushed in the wedge of a wall, holding onto tendrils of imagination and hope that they’d lift it up and find it still breathing and feed it the teet of recovery? Every time Erwin looks at Levi’s body, he dies all over again. Those Legion soldiers make love with the dead. It’s all they got.  
  
\--  
The darkly kept expectation that the funeral would be a failure, would be seen as the mocking thing it is, that Erwin could end it and reclaim Levi, is defied. The people come. They come for Levi, they come for their hero, their failure, their tragedy. They come because they have this body and no others, this body that gave itself to them and they come for him. He is Everyone they’ve lost in The Fall, and he is the inevitable end.  
Humanity feels a closing hand on its neck, a heaving breath. So they weep for a man from the trenches and lay flowers pulled from cracks in the road amongst the dry kindling. Most of what Erwin sees are weeds. Queen Anne’s lace losing her dress in the breeze. It will all make the flames rise faster.  
\--  
“You’re playing with fire by smoking here, Commander,” a light voice jests from behind, sending Erwin turning on his heels, the red ember of his cigarette paper crumbling to his feet and snuffed flat. The pyre stands mountainous beside him.  
  
A bare-footed woman skips around the shadow of Levi’s once-was. Her bouncing insolence carries Erwin with long strides to her, but she throws a moonlit face over her shoulder, black hair swinging loosely, and he draws short of her shadow with a stolen breath. With a deft leap, she vaults over the kindling and onto the marble slate, crowding over Levi like a lover.  
  
“Don’t touch him,” Erwin snarls, brought to the edge of the wood like a salt-line. “How dare you disrespect a Legion Soldier.”  
  
But she does, slim fingers, nails bitten raw and caked black, tracing Levi’s cold dead face. “He didn’t get to grow old,” she says softly, words brought up from the trenches of her unknown origin. She licks her thumb and scrubs at Levi’s cheek in a gesture that has Erwin recalling the talcum smell of his own mother’s hands.  
  
It’s too dark to see how Levi barely has wrinkles settled into his skin, nothing that wasn’t forced on by stress. Guilt curdles in Erwin’s stomach.  
  
“He didn’t,” he agrees. “Many don’t.”  
  
Her head tilts, hair cascading over her shoulders, blocking a defeated smile from Erwin’s view. “No, I didn’t think he would.” She skims her thumb along his eyelashes, the way children do with vanes of a feather. “You can only evade death for so long. Even if you’re a slippery boy.” She looks at Erwin like they’re sharing the same secret.  
  
“Madame,” he reaches a hand to her as though he would see her dismount from a carriage. “Tonight is not a night to test my patience.”  
  
“But it’s a night to test your faith,” she dismisses over her shoulder, caressing Levi’s cheeks, reverent. Whatever confidence a dead man gives her sends her to her feet, something risen under the moonlight. “What if he lived again?”  
  
Erwin’s very bones strain with his weariness. “Leave, before you are forcibly removed and punished.” Her dirty feet leaves smudges next to Levi’s head. It’s almost impossible to look away from the stains of disrespect to the glint of a dark promise in her smile. “Now,” he pronounces.  
  
When he thinks back on tonight, he will never quite be able to remember what this woman looked like, but there isn’t any warmth in her body when she comes to his arms and whispers the unthinkable into his ear; _you can have him forever._  
  
She leaves handprints of ash on Levi’s whitened face.  
__  
Grief, insanity, a broken heart. Desperation, hope. A last resort, a proper farewell. Erwin steals Levi’s body from the alter.  
  
A ravine along the outer edge of Sina, toward the eastern entrance to the Underground, a patch of marigolds. Bury him face up. Sleep lightly, Commander.  
\--  
Erwin is called before Zackly regarding Levi’s missing body. He has long since cleaned the dirt from the bed of his nails.  
  
“Burn any of the bodies in the street,” Erwin says coldly, presenting no innocence and knowing he won’t be challenged for guilt either. “It will make no difference to the people. Give them the smoke they want.”  
\--  
Erwin testifies to bravery, to enduring hope. A wind from the east drives pillars of smoke crumbling towards the capital. The sun rises.  
  
It sets.  
__  
  
It isn’t as though Erwin had forgotten what he’d done, but opening the door to Levi, filthy all over and no less dead looking, was not among his plans that night. He’s learned to think on his feet.  
  
Levi doesn’t remember anything between falling in Maria and waking up in the backend of Sina. He’s angry and confused and nursing his head like a man hungover, but otherwise - fine. He’s “thirsty as fuck” and he smells like “the chamber pot of a whorehouse.” But he’s whole, his neck unbroken, bruises gone. He pins Erwin with his eyes as Erwin washes dirt from his hair in the privacy of his bathroom, scrubbing away makeup and soil until Levi is raw and new.  
  
“I died?” Levi inspects his hands, pruned from the bath. “Huh. This is one fucked up afterlife.”  
  
“You’re not dead,” Erwin repeats firmly, dumping a cup of water over his head and sluicing soap from his hair. Levi scrubs his hand up his face, pushing the black foliage of his hair over the crown of his head.  
  
“You sure you’re not the dead one?” he leers, mouth the teasing spread of mongoose teeth.  
  
“No.” Maybe he is dead. Maybe this is Hell. But Hell wouldn’t give him Levi back.  
  
Erwin’s bluntness quiets Levi’s expression, sulks his shoulders. Its enough to draw Erwin in to kiss him, Levi’s mouth a slanted howl. They barely get started before Levi’s lip gushes like an overripe berry, salt and metal in Erwin’s mouth. He fails to consider its coldness.  
  
“Fuck,” Erwin presses a rag to Levi’s mouth. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rough.”  
  
Levi barely hears him above the static of a red stain on Erwin’s chin. He sucks on the wound of his dry lip, swallowing himself whole, bloating like a tick.  
  
When he’s sure the wound has clotted, Erwin laughs dazedly, drawing back from Levi, limbs pulled close from a snapping coldness he imagines. “You must be starved.” A sack of old bones.  
  
After a breath of deliberation, Levi nods. “Famished.”  
  
The water left in the tub smells of decay. Tracks of dirt cling to the walls like spider legs.  
\--  
The night should be marked by cries of joy or screams of terror to have the dead returned, but it’s silent, between hours of night and morning when the sky isn’t pitch and the moon blues all over the trees and roofs, even on the zinc lean-tos set against the inner walls that crowd families together like they’ve returned to the maternal womb once and for all.  
  
Levi has risen like the proverbial phoenix from the ashes -- Hell has come unto them and yet he persists, twice-round landing on Erwin’s hand to deliver them. All and nothing has changed; tea steams up from the cup in his hands, and Erwin goes without sleep.  
  
“You will remain incognito for an unknown duration of time,” Erwin instructs, chin heavy in his hand. “I’ll set you up with housing away from military personnel. It’s havoc out there, no one will notice a new body in any neighborhood.”  
  
“What the fuck is the point of resurrecting me if I can’t do jack shit?” Levi curls his lip, head lolling back on the couch. He drawls his words out in a challenge, faintly amused and hard-edged. It lacks his usual playfulness.  
  
Erwin smiles bitterly. “I didn’t expect anything of it.” He still doesn’t believe Levi is really there. His steps make no sound at all, his shadow shrinks beneath his body. Even his breath doesn’t stir the steam of his tea -- but the cup empties with each sip.  
  
It’s the hour. All blues, white-faced moon.  
  
“But it will serve us now,” Erwin continues, blinking himself into focus. “You’re dead on paper. You’re no longer our beacon of strength, but I still need you. A player in the shadows is…an unexpected boon.”  
  
Levi’s laughter shakes the room. His mouth doesn’t open at all. “How many secrets are you keeping up your sleeve, Erwin,” Levi asks, bare feet caked in filth and dancing in slices of the moon spilled on the floor.  
  
Erwin shakes his head, a buzz in his ear. Levi hasn’t moved, still falling into his teacup. Remote.  
  
“It’d figure you make my death into an opportunity,” Levi hums. “I should expect nothing less.” Levi puts the cup down and rises to his spotless feet, prowling his way to Erwin’s side. Levi consumes him with a kiss, sucking his lungs inside out and releasing him when he’s had his strangling fill. “So how long?”  
  
“Till what?” Erwin asks, licking blood from his lip, not sure of its origins. Levi’s so pale, he has none to spare.  


“Till you command an army of the dead.”  
  
It’d be a dirty lie to say he hadn’t considered it.  
\---  
Erwin wakes up limbs frozen stiff, eyes roving wild and whines cutting into his throat where they slip back into his blood -- red eyes hover over him, a weight like the grind of molars digging into his ribs so each breath feels like his last. Buried alive. Buried, and demons descending.  
  
“You look scared,” the red eyes hiss. A slash of night pounces on him, leaving red behind -- Levi shakes him awake, cackling low. “Nightmares?” Moonlight bludgeons his ghostly face.  
  
Erwin comes to free-fall limbs and a rush of air under Levi’s ashen kiss. “Yes.”  
  
Levi darts a cold tongue between Erwin’s lips, tasting the choke at the back of his throat. He fills Erwin up, greedy hands twisting in cornsilk hair, gold rush and bloodletting imperialism. Kingdom come, nipped at the budding beginning.  
  
“Levi,” Erwin gasps, twisting away, twisting out of his blankets and against the vine-tightness of Levi’s clutches. Nature come and grown over him, wild and unattended. “Stop.”  
  
_“I need you,”_ Levi pleads, scratching turned rows into Erwin’s arms. _“I’m not ready for you to leave.”_  
  
Erwin recoils against the echo of his own prayers. His words are a ritual, bringing the night sky like a flood into the room. His words, rolling thunder, a dirth. “An angel on your shoulder? Your hunting falcon?” Levi bites into the flesh roundness of Erwin’s bottom lip. “You want me for your trumpet of war?”  
  
He kisses a curse into Erwin, a second fire -- the flames put off from consuming his body come back now, an inferno Hell deep. For all his expectations of damnation, bearing the weight of wrath drives him to terror, and Erwin revolts, thrashing against Levi. He snarls, pushing Erwin down, nipping his chin with a shiver of delight at the hollow whine of pain.  
  
“I gave you my heart once -- and it wasn’t enough. You fuck. You selfish fuck, Erwin -- Erwin,” he smoothes to a purr. “You’re so goddamn greedy. Couldn’t stand to do this alone, hmm.” He rests his cool cheek to Erwin’s sweating face. “You need me.” A kiss sweeps across his brow. “You’re avenging angel. You’re slayer.” He plagues Erwin with kisses. “A sword to fall on.”  
  
Wraith he is, Erwin still throws him off, wresting himself from his sheets and meeting Levi’s springing tackle with his own revolt. He can’t yell out because Levi is dead and he’s here and the world is ending beyond the Walls.  
  
“Maybe I wanted to be dead. Did you consider that this world is torture?” Levi hisses, grappling with Erwin’s larger bulk. He’s not really putting up a fight, just a struggle. “I’m not just a weapon. You robbed me even of death. Nothing is good enough for you.”  
  
“Levi, please,” Erwin begs, twisting him closer and away, wavering as Levi thrashes, cries.  
  
“How many times will I have to die for you?” Levi drops into his arms, all fight gone, lamenting into Erwin’s chest with shuddering breaths that threaten to crack ribs and spines. Erwin covets him close, for once out of words, out of schemes and reasoning. He’d ridden off with Levi’s body and buried it, never expecting to hold it again, to have Levi animate in this world again.  
  
Levi _wasn_ ’t supposed to come back, and now Erwin had to find answers for the unimaginable. This is the moment before greatness. The unimaginable has happened.  
  
“This is a miracle,” Erwin says into a crown of hair as black as topsoil. “Your return is a miracle, Levi.” With the still pushing him, Erwin sinks to his knees before the risen, clasping his chalky hands, baring his face in a promise he plans for the whole of Humanity. “It must be.”  
  
If Titans can grow back, why can’t men? A plot of marigolds and a disbelieving whim. Who said such things can’t be done? What god made less of them?  
  
Erwin’s next hopeful breath is doused in petrichor, earth split open to a weeping pit. Levi cups his face, drawing Erwin high on his knees. Words flutter from Levi’s lips, fury in the wings. “Men like us don’t get second chances.”  
  
A leviathan maw breaks Levi’s face open wide as he crashes to Erwin, broken blade teeth biting down. The shout that opens Erwin’s mouth for help rends flesh from flesh. Blood flows from Erwin’s ruined face, and this body of Levi snaps for more, swallowing the charms of Erwin whole. Screaming, bleeding, cursing, Erwin fights with a roar in his ears, battering back at the terror of his mistakes.  
  
“Erwin! Erwin” Levi shrieks, thrown down and desperate, eyes as wide as his jagged mouth. The wail of a motherless child. “How can I die again?”  
  
Gored fist in a snatch of Levi’s hair, crooking his neck back to its limit, Erwin considers this second death as he bashes Levi’s face into the floor again and again, grunting like he’s fucking as the forehead caves, nose pulverized, eyes gone jelly in a mess of shattered bones, teeth knocked back into the throat. Smashing until the hard thuds turn wet and pulpy and his grip slips on soaked hair.  
  
Mike and Hanji recoil in their rescue at the sight of Erwin’s face stripped of half its flesh, teeth exposed and blood drooling onto the corpse of the late Corporal that’s days long dead, recognizable only by the formal uniform.  



End file.
